Others have had a crack at the story too, with the likes of Fairfax and News Ltd also publishing pieces on Roberts’ “wacky” beliefs.

Roberts is running for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, which is best known for its matriarch Pauline Hanson and her anti-Islamic rhetoric.

Her party wants to “ban the burqa” and install surveillance cameras in Muslim schools and mosques.

In short, Roberts thinks there’s an international cabal of bankers and socialists cutting across the United Nations, science institutions and the financial institutions, including the US Federal Reserve, who have conspired in some way to push “climate fraud” on the world.

Anyway, in my story I pointed out how it appeared that Roberts, the project manager for the Galileo Movement, had been behind One Nation’s climate policy.

Now rather than explain why I think this, you should instead play this little game of Spot the Difference and then decide for yourself!

Remembering for a minute the reef has just gone through its worst bleaching event on record leading to the death of a quarter of the corals – a huge and historic deal that will impact the reef for the rest of our lifetimes.

But anyway, over the weekend The Australian published a story about Professor Peter Ridd, of James Cook University, who had apparently been disciplined for criticising colleagues and the the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) for using some old pictures of reef near Stone Island to show how coral cover had declined over time.

According to Graham Lloyd, The Australian’s environment editor, Ridd said the pictures – from between 1890 and 2012 – didn’t show for sure the reefs were declining. Scientists needed to be more sceptical, he said.

For kicking up a stink, Ridd was reportedly almost fired.

The Australian also reported that Ridd had sent scientists out to check on the reef in question – valiantly displaying the kind of scientific skepticism that was so lacking in others. Some areas were OK, The Australian said.

Mark Steyn, the climate science denier and conservative commentator, has just arrived in Australia for a tour.

Tonight he’s appearing on the ABC’s Q&A program, where his biography describes him as a “leading Canadian human rights activist” as well as other things.

But the ABC doesn’t mention that Steyn’s presence in Australia is entirely down to the Institute of Public Affairs – the “free market” thinktank that hides its funders but has made its views on human-caused climate change perfectly clear for the last 25 years or so.

They reckon it’s all bunk.

So anyway, Steyn’s ABC profile should really mention the IPA and it’s curious that it doesn’t.

So what might be engaging Mark Steyn during his trip down under? Well, as a free market evangelist, you’d think Steyn would frown upon the use of inefficient tax breaks.

The IPA said the book would cost about $175,000 to produce. Mark Steyn authored a chapter.

As I wrote on DeSmogBlog, some months later, the book turned up for sale on Steyn’s website, where he flogs mugs, CDs and books to help him pay his legal bills.

The sale, Steyn wrote, would hep him “push back against the climate mullahs.”

Now the IPA’s book was being published by “Stockade Books” – a venture owned by Steyn. I hope Steyn remembers to thank the Australian Tax Office while he’s here.

In the book, Steyn attacks a group of researchers who got stuck in the Antarctic in Christmas 2013. He has claimed that the researchers thought the ice in the Antarctic was melting, which made for a beautiful irony when their ship got hemmed in by ice.

Except, the researchers did know the ice in Antarctica was growing as they had expressly pointed out before they left. In fact, the phenomena was part of their field of study.

In December 2015, Steyn gave “evidence” to a US Senate science subcommittee, chaired by climate science denier Ted Cruz. Cruz opened proceedings recounting the same Antarctic story – also getting it entirely wrong, as I wrote the other day on The Guardian.

In his testimony, Steyn complained that climate science deniers were being victimised and pushed out, forgetting for a minute that he is sometimes a host on Fox News, where of course climate science deniers are part of the furniture.

“In shoring up this cartoon climatology, the alarmism industry is now calling on courts and legislatures to torment their opponents,” wrote Steyn.

Steyn wrote that after Soon had managed to get a paper published in a journal attacking climate models, the reaction of the “climate mullahs” was swift.

“The Big Climate heavies did not attempt to refute the paper, but instead embarked on a campaign to get him fired from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,” he wrote.

Steyn is spinning a false narrative here, because in fact Soon’s paper, which he co-authored with Lord Christopher Monckton, was refuted through the appropriate channel – a paper published in the same journal four months before Steyn’s testimony.

In a further attempt at painting climate scientists as reactionaries, he points to one group that had written to President Obama to encourage him to look at the country’s racketeering laws as an option to pursue oil giant Exxon for its years of funding climate science denial.

But here’s another part of the story that Steyn misses out. There’s a precedent for the use of these laws in the US.

They are the same laws that were used to pursue tobacco companies for that industries campaign to deny the science linking their deadly products to health concerns.

What’s more, the use of these laws was not even the idea of the scientists in question. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse had been suggesting it months before in a widely reported series of statements.

Then to close his written testimony, Steyn referenced a paper written by scientists at the federally funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The paper concluded that a reported slowdown in warming at the Earth’s surface had actually been a data anomaly.

Steyn claimed that the scientists involved had been fiddling the data.

But after spending several breathless pages accusing the establishment of hounding poor old climate science deniers, he then forgot to mention how the NOAA scientists had then been hounded by Republican politicians with requests for correspondence and data (the data was already out there).

From previous academic papers and his own research, Farrell had compiled a list of 164 organisations that were part of the “climate counter-movement”.

The list includes US groups like the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Cato Institute, Heartland Institute, together with a few non-US groups including the UK’s Global Warming Policy Foundation and Australia’s Institute of Public Affairs.

Then Farrell looked at which of these organisations had received money from either oil giant Exxon Mobil or from groups linked to the Koch brothers – the billionaire owners of the oil, gas and petrochemical conglomerate Koch Industries.

“Donations from these corporate benefactors signals entry into a powerful network of influence,” wrote Farrell.

Farrell found that 84 of those 164 organisations were part of that “powerful network” having taken funding from Exxon, the Kochs, or from both.

Then Farrell compiled a huge dataset of “every text about climate change produced by every organization between 1993 and 2013” – that’s 40,785 texts with more than 39 million words.

Thankfully Farrell didn’t have to read all that bilge. Instead, he used some clever and sophisticated algorithms and computer content analysis to do it for him.

With this dataset and method, Farrell looked at how often these 164 organisations covered particular issues.

Did the organisations that took cash from the Kochs or Exxon behave differently to those that were not funded as part of that “powerful network of influence”?

Two arguments in particular seemed to stand out. Organisations that took that influential funding were far more likely to use that disingenuous climate science denialist talking point that CO2 is good for the planet. That’s the chart above.

Another favourite contrarian talking point – that climate change was just part of a natural long term cycle rather than being driven by humans – was also more popular among the Exxon/Koch group. Here’s what that looked like.

Now of course, it’s possible that the corporate funding was not influencing the specific talking points that the organisations were using. Perhaps the fact that they liked to say “CO2 is good” simply made them attractive to funders like Exxon? That could be so, although Farrell tested other favourite subjects too.

For example, funding appeared to make no difference to the timing and frequency of attacks on former US vice president and climate change campaigner Al Gore. Nor did it make much of a difference to arguments about cap and trade laws.

In a separate study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Farrell looked at how the 164 different groups were networked together.

One of the United States’ most visible climate science denialists, Marc Morano, has a new movie coming out that he claims will “rock the climate debate”. It won’t.

What it will do, though, is apparently rehash some old climate science denial talking points.

Hiding away on the website of the documentary’s producers was a segment destined for the film. The segment put some slick graphics to the old myth that because carbon dioxide is only a small part of the atmosphere, that it couldn’t have an effect on the climate.

So I asked some leading climate scientists to look at it, and then produced a bit of a critique of my own.

Anyway, here’s the vid. UPDATE:Marc Morano has contacted DeSmog to say the clip was not in the final version of the film. I’ve clarified this in the YouTube clip and the clarification also appears on the DeSmog story that went with it. I also apologise. The clip was on the public website of Climate Hustle’s production company, CDR Communications (screenshot here) , and was marked “Climate Hustle”. As of right now, 7 Jan 2016, the clip remains there. I should say also, that Mr Morano and CFACT executive director Craig Rucker both told me outside their Paris screening that they would have welcomed me to see the film, but that it was full. People in the screening later told myself and DeSmog editor Brendan DeMelle that the theatre was in fact only about 70 per cent full.